To ask or not to ask. Representations of the past in the sport version of "Chto? Gde? Kogda?"

Application of formal methods (%2 = 27.642, df = 14, p-value = 0.01587) allows specifying that only 2007 edition of the tournament included significantly bigger number of questions than it could be expected (standardized residual > 3).

Despite different design and audience in SChGK and Who Wants to be a Millionaire?, we can compare Figures 1 and 2 with Hestroni's findings, and a slight difference in topical distribution might be observed. While both games' authors in their work rely on what the audience knows, the proportion of questions devoted to the past is twice higher in the case of the mid-2000s' SChGK. Also, questions devoted to the other countries' past is at least as most frequent as ones representing the Russian and the Soviet history whereas the TV show's editors are slightly more interested in “local” facts Amir Hestroni, “The Millionaire Project: A Cross-Cultural Analysis of Quiz Shows From the United States, Russia, Poland, Norway, Finland, Israel, and Saudi Arabia,” Mass Communication & Society 7, no. 2 (2004): 147.. Results of such a comparison should compromise nobody because SChGK is not a game for masses, it entertains players while TV show entertains its viewers; in other words, the former game's audience is willing not simply to participate but primarily to compete, and due to this feature the content includes “academic” knowledge more frequently. Considering that the proportion of questions devoted to the abroad has been slightly growing in SChGK correlates with the interviewed authors' vision that players tend to become more “cosmopolite” instead of constantly reconceptualize their own past(s) through the game Author 7, interview by author, Kyiv and Amsterdam (via Skype), January 20, 2020; Author 2, interview by author, Rostov on Don and Amsterdam (via Skype), January 14, 2020..

Nevertheless, why do authors continue composing questions devoted to the Soviet history while they also admit that ones can provoke players unsatisfaction and subsequently decrease potential interest from following tournaments' organizing committees, espec ially in the case of the Russian Synchronized Open which is an international tournament? The easiest way to answer this contradiction is a concern that hundreds of relatively aged znatoki are still active and absence of such questions would cause their criticism, thus authors are forced to balance sets they prepare with “Soviet” questions. A more complicated answer requires recalling that the overwhelming majority of authors admitted while being interviewed that they rarely read sources specifically to find interesting facts and followingly construct questions based on them. On the contrary, facts usually find authors when the latter ones read books or webpages which caused their personal interest or are simply trendy. In other words, questions in a way reflect what is published, printed, filmed, taped or podcasted about the past, and the intensity of these processes might influence the content authors work on. For example, the dataset demonstrates that a third of questions about WWI were asked in 2014 when the 100th anniversary of the war's outbreak was celebrated, and subsequently numerous popular-history materials on the topic came into the public access. The trend is similar for questions about the past editions of the Olympics. Usually, authors present such questions each leap-year when a new Olympiad takes place and the awaiting event is widely discussed in media that publishes numerous materials about the previous competitions, outstanding records, famous retired athletes and other subtopics.

Simultaneously, an interest towards Russian and Soviet past is still alive in a public sphere. As aforementioned founder of “Arzamas Academy” tells, while his project offers free lectures, podcasts and other materials in different fields of Humanities and Social Sciences, ones about the country's history are the most demandable. This witnessing is supported by Natalia Lipilina, editor-in-chief of the portal “RU Public History”, who highlights that an interest towards twentieth-century Russia grows encouraging people to create new “historical” projects of any form. She also underlines that Public History in Russia is a field where many journalists run being unable to work under censorship in mass-media but still willing to produce content and influence the audience's minds. In his article, Lipilina mentions online projects 1917 and 1968 which were created by a former journalist Mikhail Zygar and his colleagues with consultancy by professional historians and financial support of private companies (“Yandex” and “Alfa Bank respectively”). In 2020, Zygar launched a new project called Nastoiashchii 1945 (The true 1945), again with sponsorship by “Yandex”.

Interestingly, one of the interviewed authors told that a high interest towards questions about the Soviet past in the mid-2000s could be explained with popularity of documentaries and TV shows about history of Russia and the USSR, especially Namedni. This TV show was created by a journalist Leonid Parfyonov and broadcasted on the cusp of the 20th and 21st centuries on NTV, one of the biggest TV channels in the country. Each series of Namedni is devoted to a particular year from 1961 to 2003 and phenomena that year brought to our contemporary culture and understanding of the current situation in Russia and the world.

After being fired in 2004, Parfyonov started producing documentaries about notable Russian and Soviet writers, inventors and scientists revealing persons who had not received enough public attention such as Vladimir Zvorykin or Sergei Prokudin-Gorskiy. In 2018, the journalist launched his own YouTube channel and revitalized «Namedni» publishing series devoted to post-WWII years in the Soviet Union. Currently, Parfyonov (and Zygar) is as independent as authors who compose questions for SChGK tournaments, therefore the most important (or even the main) reason to restart his project was the audience's interest in the Soviet past; obviously, authors in a way follow this trend looking for sources for his questions. In other words, while communicating with the Soviet past could already end for some authors and players, it actually continues outside the community where questions actually come from, and this continuing debates cause appearance of new questions that return authors and players to a broader vision of the past.

Despite the fact that new sources appear extremely fast for the authors, they cannot deny many players' concern about the Soviet past - elsewise, they would not frequently share this observation while being interviewed. Even though the number of questions devoted to the past of Russia and especially the Soviet Union has not drastically dropped, why did many authors state that such questions have been tending to extinct? It is possible that authors just extrapolate players' criticism towards particular Soviet-related topics in questions whereas a stricter filter comes to be present. An explanation might be found with a closer examination of topical distribution for these questions which is presented in Figure 3.

As it illustrates, the most popular topics from the Russian past is Everyday Life and Literature while State, Law & International Relations, Hight Culture and War have also attracted a significant portion of attention from authors. Considering the Soviet past, questions about Light Entertainment are the second most common whereas ones about Literature and Everyday Life are also among the most frequent. Combining this graph with Figure 4 that puts this data on a timeline, a clue might be found.

Figure 4 shows that the number of questions devoted to Russian and Soviet past are either stable or declining for all topics. Although it is not possible to formally prove such a decrease, I can empirically suggest that for two of three most frequent topics in representing past of the USSR - namely, Light Entertainment and Literature - have experienced a significant one. Considering the dynamics for questions about the Russian past, only religion-related questions have demonstrated growth. Arguably, it might be connected to a huge number of sources published on the topic during the recent years, but it is much more likely that a single author was interested in the topic because the peak seems to distract the authors' attention to the topic in the previous years.

The contrast turns to be even brighter comparing Figure 4 and Figure 5. The latter one demonstrates how topical distribution has changed for all “historical” questions regardless their geographical assignment. While for the Soviet past none of the topics has increased its popularity, the situation is different for the entire universe. In might be concluded that authors' impression of expiring Soviet-related questions is caused by proportional growth of questions about other countries' and cultures' past whereas in absolute numbers questions about the Soviet past is quite stable, and this coincides with authors' willingness to both satisfy older players' demands and balance a set's topical distribution.

Hence, a new concern arises. If the absolute number of questions devoted to Russian and Soviet past is generally stable and the overall proportion of questions representing the past grows, which countries produce such an increase? Figure 6 reveals that in this sense the most improving country is the United States (computing linear regression coefficients resulted in R2 = 0,77). While in the mid-2000s it was simply one of the most attracting countries on a par with the United Kingdom, France and Italy, American history has become the only leader around 2015. Frequency of questions devoted to the Great Britain grows relatively slower (R2 = 0,4), whereas one for other chosen countries have not changed greatly. Such superiority of the Anglo-Saxon past in the game's content might be explained in two different ways. First, the interviewed authors (especially the younger ones) have shared that they prefer sources in English due to their higher level of referencing and cross-checking and it would be logical to suppose that the majority of such sources are devoted to the UK and the US.

Second, even if an author does not speak passable English, he receives information about the two countries from sources in Russian, and Figures 7 and 8 demonstrate why this might be crucial. They illustrate topical distribution for questions representing the past of most frequently mentioned countries (according to Table 1) - the former one illustrates such a distribution for the United States and the United KIngdom, and the latter one depicts the game's content devoted to the past of France and Italy (including Ancient Rome). As it can be seen from the plots, each country has one or several topics which are the most interesting for authors and players.

Arguably, combining the three recently mentioned plots reveals a reason of such a significant growth in number of questions devoted to the past of the Great Britain and the United States. Consulting with topical distribution for both pasts reveals that there are proper leaders, Everyday Life and Literature for the former case and Light Entertainment and Science & Technology for the latter. While countries such as France and Italy which have been mostly attracting authors (and players) because of their High Culture do not enrich this attention, pasts that demand less embedment are flourishing. Remembering that an author usually composes questions based on what he or she reads, listens or watches about the past (not vice versa) and that this author relies on an average player's knowledge, it becomes understandable why such a shift has happened. Authors (as many people) watch movies or read books much more frequently than visiting museums of fine arts or opera theatres. After an author finishes reading or watching, he or she starts exploring materials about a writer, a director, a singer or an actor and once finds an interesting fact that might be incorporated into a question. Also, the audience watches the same films or read the same books with a greater chance than observing particular paintings or visiting theatres; for an author, biding with questions related to Literature and Light Entertainment is an insurance from being accused in writing elitist and snobbish questions.

To conclude, while authors share the community's bias towards questions dedicated to Soviet and (less widely and actively) Russian past, the actual percentage of these questions has not significantly decreased. In reality, this past has turned to be illuminated from the opposite side - authors were tending to compose their questions about Soviet film production, television, entertaining practices, and literature, and such a fashion is not wide currently. Interestingly, this shift contradicts the paradigm of “nostalgic modernization” Ilya Kalinin, “Nostal'gicheskaia modernizatsiia: Sovetskoe proshloe kak istoricheskii gorizont,” Neprikosnovenny Zapas 6 (2010): 6-16. described by Kalinin. As the scholar argues, the government prefers to accurately incorporate the communist experience into the general narrative of Russian history reducing its Soviet period from being history to being past as well as highlighting the USSR's contribution to development of ceaseless national culture and current technological equipment. Becoming more internationalized and undergoing a significant commercialization, SChGK does not follow the described track; in contrast, the community of players highlights the uniqueness of the Soviet past. Also, the aforementioned factors of the game's recent development force authors to excavate interesting facts on meadows of commonly known subjects, and the Western (mostly American and British) past has come to satisfy this demand.

Conclusion

In this thesis, I have tried to study how the past is represented in questions composed for the sport version of Chto? Gde? Kogda? with assistance of taking interviews with its authors and digital analysis of a relatively big number of questions. As Voroshilov's TV show in the 1990s, SChGK has undergone a commercialization and become a business that must consider its needs and demands. Although, while the initial game has always been a market constituent competing for the audience's attention, sponsorship contracts and a slot in the channel's broadcasting schedule, its real-world successor might be seen as the market itself where organizing committees and authors campaign for the playing community's respect. For the content's creators, it has been becoming more important to satisfy the audience's expectations instead of their own “artistic” desires, and this need to be aligned with your clients insists on authors' more careful interaction with the past represented in their questions.

As it has been demonstrated above, the factual correctness (if not truthfulness) lies in the core of the studied game; therefore, authors must not mimic pseudo historians creating fictional historical facts and have to be extremely accurate working with their sources. Being self-distanced from a very positivist viktorina and concentrated on interpreting narratives rather than merely knowing facts, SChGK has not lost an idea that an inevitably important feature of this game is correspondence to conventional knowledge and relying on sources equally available to an author and a player. In this sense, the technological development that took place during the last decade has contributed significantly - while authors have received infinitely large number of sources waiting to be explored, players can check each author's level of proficiency and attention to factual correctness. Certainly, this works for questions devoted to the past as well.

According to the interviewed authors, an important feature of composing questions is one that authors do not read academic publications mostly preferring popular historical ones and online resources. This allows to claim that studying the game's content is in a way studying how the past is supplied for the contemporary Russian-speaking public. Even taking into account the community's specificity, it arguably reveals that while the “market” began to flourish around 2015 and explore new pasts both topically, culturally and geographically, the Russian and Soviet past were not ignored. Despite the ongoing internationalization of the playing community on the one hand and the government-backed narrative of blurring boundaries between the Soviet and the Russian in the country's history on the other, authors continue composing questions about Russia and the Soviet Union. This demonstrates that first, media publishes materials devoted to this past and second, the majority of znatoki are ready to consume this information about the USSR and Russia as well as people outside of the community regardless their country of origin and residence.

What allows SChGK to run counter to the promoted approach towards the past? To begin with, the sport version carries an intangible connection to its predecessor on TV and attracts mostly educated people because both knowing something and ability to think creatively and critically are extremely needed to succeed in the game. At the same time, SChGK is not connected administratively to either the shooting company or any governmental body; thus, it allows the community to be practically fully independent and self-regulating. In these circumstances, both factual and ethical correction of the content's creators become crucially important, and the latter ones should filter their questions, rely on sources they use and ascertain these sources' reliability and veracity. The community's heterogeneity in terms of players' age and nationality makes authors' work even more difficult and competitive forcing them to be extremely accurate representing the past in their questions. Trying to give an advantage for no group of players, authors tend to interact with the past quite accurately. Arguably, any group that possesses aforementioned features (or at least the majority of them) possibly scatters the general perception of the past promoted domestically by the Russian government.

For sure, this thesis does not strive to present a comprehensive research on the game and its community. In fact, doing this research has revealed that SChGK's complexity and versatility hides a fertile field for not only historians, but scholars from other disciplines. It is more than possible to use the game's materials to contribute sociology of knowledge studying how players are expected to know something in time when the only thing a person really should remember is how to google. It would be also interesting to compare content of the sport version and original show taking into account that the latter one is broadcasted on state- regulated TV channel. Obviously, the collected dataset might be enriched to make more reliable conclusion in comparison with ones I was able to present above. Although Huizinga proclaimed that game is opposite to real world and routine, the show's motto “What is our life? A game!” seems to be more reasonable in a way, and present and previous life's complexity is mirrored in what I have tried to study and what I would like to enrich in following research.

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Appendix

How long have you been composing and/or editing questions? How active it is? Has the level of involvement into this process changed through time?

What is you level of education? In which field do you have a degree?

Where you were born and where do you currently reside?

What is your native language? What other language do you speak and use while composing questions?

Does composing questions devoted to the past differ from writing questions on other topics? Do you use any specific approaches towards the former ones?

How do you verify facts about the past while composing questions? How do you understand that a source is valid?

If you are asked to prepare a set of question for a tournament, does your approach varies depending this tournament's target audience, players' age and nationality? Does this approach work for questions about the past similarly?

Do organizing committees ask authors to include into a set some questions dedicated to particular historical topics? Have you ever experienced this? If so, provide as many examples as possible.

Do organizing committees ask authors not to include into a set some questions dedicated to particular historical topics? Have you ever experienced this? If so, provide as many examples as possible.

Have you ever received a portion of feedback from players concerning factual mistakes in your question? If so, provide as many examples as possible.

Have you ever received a portion of feedback from players concerning a traumatic and/or contradictory historical topic represented in your question? If so, provide as many examples as possible.

Have you ever received a portion of feedback from players concerning an ethically incorrect from of representing the past in your question? If so, provide as many examples as possible. sports popular game portraying

How would you summarize the change towards questions about the past within authors and the game's community at whole through time? Has the authors' approach towards these questions changed?

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